Visit us at the Brooklyn Book Festival

We're really excited to be participating in the annual Brooklyn Book Festival this coming Sunday, September 13th at the Brooklyn Borough Hall. As their website says, the festival is a "huge, free public event presenting an array of literary stars and emerging authors who represent the exciting world of literature today."

This year's festival promises to be fantastic. Check out the Village Voice's preview:

Already a geek’s delight, the Brooklyn Book Festival will be even more so this year with the brand-new addition of the New York Comic Con Pavilion. With guest presentations and autograph sessions, the comic-book marketplace has panels including “Sci Fi and Fantasy in NYC” at noon and a conversation with the writers of Marvel at 1 p.m. The most exciting (and free!) literary event in the city, this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival also features events with Colson Whitehead, Mary Gaitskill, Heidi Julavits, Edwidge Danticat, David Cross, Thurston Moore, and Tom Tomorrow—to name just a few. Other panels to look for include one with Pete Hamill and Norris Church Mailer on the legacy of Norman Mailer at 1 p.m., and “Writers on Unforgettable Friendships” with New York Review of Books contributors Oliver Sacks (discussing Francis Crick), Darryl Pinckney (discussing Djuna Barnes), and Anita Desai (discussing Ruth Jhabvala) at 4 p.m.

We'll be at table # 87, so stop by and check out a variety of SUNY and Excelsior Editions titles that celebrate New York. For location and direction information, as well as a full list of authors and moderators who'll be in attendance, visit the festival's website.

Hope to see you there!

From Coney Island to the Catskills

We have a tandem of books to share with you today, each providing definitive oral histories of their respective regions of New York State: It Happened in Brooklyn and It Happened in the Catskills.

It Happened in Brooklyn tells the story of the Brooklyn of legend in mid-century America. From stickball in the streets to the Dodgers playing in Ebbets Field, from eating Coney Island franks to commuting across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, this book is an ode to the era of working- and middle-class Brooklynites forging their paths in the postwar years.

It Happened in the Catskills reminisces about the famed “Borscht Belt,” that fabled summer resort area “just ninety minutes from Broadway.” More than a hundred Catskill veterans—from the famed entertainers to the cooks, waiters, busboys, mamboniks, and boys in the band—share their memories of this golden era.

Both books are loaded with beautiful period pictures.